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This is a page aimed at helping students working on parrot as part of the Google Summer of Code get acclimated into the community. It doesn't deal with any coding matters but rather the administrative matters you'll need to get out of the way first.

The first thing you'll need to do is register an account on trac.parrot.org. This is a prerequisite to getting commit access to svn, which is managed via trac credentials.

The following step is to send in a signed copy of the Parrot CLA. The instructions for sending it in are included in the document. There can be some delay in the process of activating a commit bit after the CLA is recieved, so try to get this done as soon as possible. In the meantime, you don't need a CLA to submit patches so feel free to do so. Your GSoC mentor should be able to guide you on the patch submission process if you need any help, but the usual way is to open a Trac ticket with the patch attached and then bug people on IRC until it's committed or you get some feedback.

Subscribing to parrot-commits and parrot-dev is highly recommended. parrot-commits sends you a message with a diff every time there's a svn commit and parrot-dev is the place for general development discussion. Most of the commit messages you can safely ignore, but they can provide some insight into how other developers work, and can help you gauge the community's general 'standard' for commit quality. If you want a good example to follow, chromatic is a good choice, he's a good coder and usually does a very good job of explaining code changes in the commit messages.

Attending the parrot developers weekly #parrotsketch planning meetings are mandatory for all GSoC students, as that is the place where developers post 'status reports' letting everyone else know how their tasks are progressing and the weekly development priorities are set. You should also explore the wiki a bit, but I guess you must already be doing it if you are here ;).